Photography and video aren't the same job, even on the same car
A film gets to move. It can travel along a curve and let a highlight run the length of a panel, and if one angle doesn't work the next second of footage fixes it.
A still has one frame to do all of that, so the work moves forward instead: where the car stands, where the reflections land, and what the frame leaves out. Cars are mirrors with wheels. On a photograph there's no second pass at a bad reflection.
6am, because that's when the light gets in
The Bugatti Chiron Super Sport set was shot at Project One Motors in Al Quoz at six in the morning, because that's when the light gets into the showroom and nobody else is in it.
Most of what I shoot is indoors under light I can control rather than out in the middle of a Dubai afternoon, where the sun sits directly overhead for most of the working day and does a car no favours at all.
The grade is where the hour goes
A dark car photographed honestly sits near black, and near black is where cheap editing falls apart. Either it gets crushed into a silhouette with no panel detail left, or it gets lifted until the black turns grey and the car stops looking expensive.
Pulling detail out of near-black without lifting it is the slow part of the job. There's a before-and-after on the Bugatti case study if you want to see what that does to one frame.
What it gets shot on
- Sony A7R3 for stills, a Sigma 24-70mm for most frames and a Sony 50mm when the shot wants to be tighter.
- Sony FX3 when the same car also needs moving footage, so the shoot doesn't have to happen twice.
- A DJI RS5 gimbal and an Osmo Pocket for the video side, on the days it's both.
- Delivered web-ready as well as full-size, because a listing page loaded with full-size JPEGs is a slow listing page.
The stills and the page they end up on
Car photography almost always ends up on a website, a listing or an ad, and images are usually the reason those are slow. I build the sites too - the Project One Motors rebuild loads in 0.4 seconds with the cars on it - so I know what the page needs before the shoot rather than after somebody has to re-export everything at half the size.